Matt Jacobs asks some good questions about functionalism
Today Matt Jacobs comments on Gary Angel’s recent white paper on functionalism in web analytics. I was impressed but immediately critical of the paper given that many of the KPIs SEMphonic proposes are fairly difficult to calculate using most of the available web analytics solutions. Gary had a great rebuttal and he and I had a nice cup of coffee (thanks Starbucks!) when I was in San Jose for Search Engine Strategies.
What I like most about functionalism is that it’s something–an approach to web analytics that is not simply ad hoc–but I share Matt’s questions at the end of his post (read his post or these questions are completely out-of-context):
1. Should this exercise be routine for site analytics or not?
2. What value do you currently place on the analysis of individual pages? Of your high volume pages?
3. What other means or methods of classification have you applied?
4. To what extent do you believe this approach will become more antiquated as technologies such as AJAX become more prevalent?
5. Do you believe these techniques will be obsolete when multivariate tools are commonplace on every website?
I guess I’ll watch Matt’s comments to see what his readers have to say. Alternatively, you could answer the questions here in my weblog and I’ll make sure that Matt sees them. Especially question four given my recent rant about measuring “Web 2.0”.
What do you think?
